What Grown-folks Teach

Another opinion piece written by me for AP Lang. Enjoy!

What Grown-folks Teach
by Cailin Rogers

Trust me, as much as I would love to rip my claws into the debate and have people lose respect for me merely for making scathing remarks, I don't want blood on my hands. This unfortunately leaves me with zero writing ideas. Let's see...abortion, already done...homosexuality…written...obviously, everything is taken!
    Aha! Now, what better topics to expand upon, then on what our very dear mommies and daddies and aunties and uncles have taught us? What little golden nuggets of knowledge have they lovingly placed into our hands? (And by our hands I mean our American hands.)
    Firstly and lastly. The Alpha and Omega piece of wisdom that they wish to give us: Money is God. Family matters, of course, but Money is what matters most. Why else would there not be a national limit to how many hours you work? Why it seems your life revolves around dollars and cents, how much you are reminded the amount it costs for you to just stand there. Understand the fact that you live on a ladder called career, and you must constantly be looking at the rung above yours. It is your moral obligation that at Thanksgiving and during the holidays you look at a rung below yours, but by January 1^st, your eye better be on the top rung.  
    In sequential order with the last tidbit, stuff is important. By stuff I mean houses, cars, computers, horse-drawn carriages, and you better pray to Money if you don’t have the most recent iPhone.  Make sure you have more or as much as your neighbor. This may be difficult if you and your neighbors haven’t spoken a word since your neighbor knocked on your door and you promptly discovered at six on a Saturday morning, that he was a Jehovah’s Witness, and he discovered you wore pajama pants with duckies on them. Be sneaky, peek through windows and make sure you always have a trusty pair of binoculars with you. Send your children to borrow cups of sugar, and then interrogate them on the inside of the neighbors’ home.  Remember, stuff is imperative to life.  
    Comparisons are also part of life. It is totally okay for you to look at a celebrity and compare the size of your anatomy to his/hers because that body part is totally real. It is also okay for you to have a low self-esteem and feel the need to change yourself, because honey, even models think they’re fat. I mean, if it wasn't why would our magazines, TV, and the beautiful wonderful Internet be covered with images of these individuals and ways for us to cure this apparent ailment?  This is also a challenge, you can have her size thighs, haven’t you heard if there’s a will there’s a way? Achieve this challenge, and all doors will be opened, you will be the life of every gathering you attend.
    The final parting words on every dying adult’s lips are two words. Be yourself.  No matter what that entails, getting a tattoo you’ll regret when your 35? Go for it. Experimenting with sketchy substances? Proud of you. Risk being stuck paying child support for an ungodly amount of time? You go kid. Because you’re being yourself, and as long as you’re being yourself, no harm no foul, no wrong can come from you being yourself.  
   So there you have it peers, all the things you are being taught by grownups. Now, all you have to do is pass that onto your children. They’ll appreciate it, I guarantee.

NOTE: The author's parental units have not taught her these values. Although the author has had to knock on a neighbor's door and awkwardly ask for two eggs because her mother refused to go all the way to the grocery store for two eggs.

AP Lang Piece

Hey guys! I have been kind of swamped with all of the crap I've had to do lately, so bear with me, I'll try to roll in the content more often.

   Anywho, I wrote a piece in my AP Language class and had to post it on this blog page and all that jazz for a grade. So far it has 0 likes, 0 comments, 22 views and counting. People are viewing it, but no comment. So, it means A: my essay was too ballsy for some people, or B: people are too lazy, or even C: not enough people know me in that class so they don't know how I would respond to commentation. Whatever. Thought I'd show you what I wrote, I'm quite proud of it.

The Taboo that Kills

by Cailin Rogers

What can you do in twenty-six seconds?  Can you tie your shoes, throw a grape in the air and catch it, post a witty tweet? Time seems to rush so fast, twenty-six seconds seem miniscule on a grand scale. But every twenty-six seconds someone is forced into sex slavery. Trapped in the worst of terrors, an unimaginable number of people are forced into the sex trafficking business.

Oops.

   Sorry, I forgot I am not supposed to talk about those kinds of things with my young impressionable peers. Some of you might cringe, some scroll onto a different article, because honestly nobody likes to read about this topic; you want to read something satirical and comedic.  My sincerest apologies, but I’ve stood toe to toe with sex-trafficking and we’ve given each other a good looking over. Neither of us like what we see.
    We all have a different exposure to sex-trafficking.  My story of exposure isn’t even mine, but needs to be shared. Once upon a time there was a girl named Shaniya Davis. This beautiful black girl was reported missing by her school and people started looking for her. She was found, luckily. In a garbage bin…in a trash bag…dead. It was discovered that she was raped to death, sold by her parents who were assumed to be loving and caring, for drugs.

Shaniya Davis was five years old. She had just started kindergarten.

    This story played out in where I was living at the time, Fayetteville, NC, the armpit of America. We were in an uproar, how could this happen? This shouldn’t and couldn’t happen to five year olds! But that was before it came to my attention that five year olds are sold every day to be raped by big scary men. In fact, nowadays three year olds are really in.

This is bad. I don’t even think I need to tell you that. But that’s not the worst bit.

   The worst bit is that there are millions of Americans who are quite a bit like you and me are. Privileged. Now, you may be thinking, um Cailin, I’m not privileged, I don’t have the iPhone 5. You have a roof over your head, food in your belly, and you are relatively safe. You are privileged.  Anyways, there are millions of you and me out there, and what do the vast majority of us do about this increasing issue?

Ignore it. Pretend it doesn’t happen.

    Today, I challenge you. Challenge you to fight the apathy that has invaded America and my generation in particular. Don't go all 'I'm only one person' on me, for godsakes, Gandhi quit eating and he stopped a civil war! I believe you have the skills to make a difference, and I believe we as privileged owe it to the oppressed to hold out our hand for them to grasp. Think, then do.
NOTE: I work with an anti-sex trafficking organization based in Australia (because Aussies are in fact, aussome). If you want to make a difference with this issue Destiny Rescue has multiple options to assist you on the matter .

Thanks guys for reading! Comment if you wish. 

Over and out.

Love,

Cailin